How Did "Ezra" Get So Popular?

A couple months ago, MIT got a lot of attention for a slick presentation they made at the TED conference. The product was called "the Sixth Sense," and it was sort of like a Minority Report interface for shoppers. Looking for information on the finest brand of toilet paper? Point your gizmo at the pack of Charmin' and let 'er rip. Your sixth sense would stream online information through your daily activities. You'd be able to navigate the world with the help of the hive mind. See for yourself:

Wolphram Alpha, the new search engine that's exciting nerds everywhere, seems like the forerunner to that. It sells itself as "an online service that answers factual queries directly by computing the answer from structured data, instead of providing a list of documents or web pages that might contain the answer." In other words, it answers rather than links. But it couldn't seem to tell me anything. I asked about the finest brand of toilet paper. It was confused. I asked about the number of uninsured in America. Nothing. So I went back to 1997 and did what any new user of a search engine does. I typed in my name.

And that worked. "Ezra," it seems, is getting a lot more popular. Wolfram hooked me up with a graph:

The big jump happens in the early-90s. But why? I doubt the band Better Than Ezra convinced a lot of parents to go with the name. Is it the rise of Kabbalah? Prescience about my future success? A sudden spike in Ezra Pound's reputation?

I don't think there's necessarily any explanation. I would assume that trends in naming behave similar to trends in stock prices, because in both cases people aren't just trying to assess the stock/name in question, but also trying to assess how EVERYBODY ELSE is currently assessing that stock/name. Most people are trying to hit the sweet spot for their children where there name will be common enough that it won't mark their child out as too unusual, while at the same time uncommon enough that they won't be (as my dad was) one of 5 people in their grade school class with the same first name. So, naming trends would be susceptible to the same sort of essentially irrational boom/bust cycles as stock prices.

I'm a bit suspicious of Wolfram's data anyhow. Compare data for "Josh" to data for "Joshua", for example, or "John" to "Jonathan" to "Jonathon". The trend lines are all wildly inconsistent with any sensible reality.

Maybe because anti-semitism is less prevalent, jews are more willing to give their children transparently jewish names? But maybe not, I'm named after my father, who is alive, and he's named after a christian martyr. Don't even get me started on my last name.

A cool application for exploring these questions and testing theories about clusters of names gaining popularity at the same time is the Name Voyager at babynamewizard.com. It's a great time waster. In any case, I have read recently, perhaps at Baby Name Wizard, that names starting with vowel sounds have been increasingly popular in the past decade or two--thus, Emily, Emma, Ella, Eva, Ava, as well as Ezra, Oliver, Ethan, Evan, etc. Put any of these names into the website and see similar spikes starting in the 90s. I don't know if there is a reason for that per se or if naming trends can ever really be explained, but it is a phenomenon.

My 4 month old nephew is named Ezra, partly because his parents like the Old Testament sound. I think Old Testament names are popular with Christians as well as Jews. New Testament names are so overused that they don't really have an expressly Christian connotation, so parents going for that have to look to the Old Testament.

My husband has a Polish name with lots of k's and z's. We named our daughter Minka and have Ezra near the top of the list if we ever have a boy, mostly because it would sound good with his name. But I'd be lying if I didn't say you were an inspiration, I loved Pandagon back in the day.